


Secret Places

by orphan_account



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: First Time, Fluff, Intimacy, M/M, No Tentacles, PWP, Phone Sex, Some Humor, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-08
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:41:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2425757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Psssh,” Cecil says, and waves one hand. “What is sex <i>really?</i> Like, is it laying on the beach during low tide? Or perhaps it’s listening to the deep, oaky tones of your soft-spoken partner. It could be the sulfur-and-viscera scent of a just-lit candle, or the ancient chants of a newly purchased blender, or—”</p><p>It’s then that Carlos realizes his boyfriend <i>literally has no idea what sex is</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Carlos has never been a fair judge of what is beautiful.

Beauty cannot be measured in a flask or weighed on a scale or quantified by any chart or graph or collection of data. It cannot be dissected or pressed between plates of glass beneath the lens of a microscope. Beauty is vague, subjective. Carlos deals in absolutes. In the objective.

But he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Cecil is beautiful.

It hits him the first time they eat at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, when Cecil slides into the opposite booth and his thick-hooded eyes, pupil-less and mother-of-pearl, catch the neon **WE’RE OPEN. WE’RE DEFINITELY OPEN** sign just right. Those eyes are so _much_ , like the void but really not. Like the opposite of the void. Like the void inverted, just endless matter and color. His tunic dips low over the tip of a tattoo Carlos has never fully seen, something floral and prickly, and his dark hair is mussed sideways from laying his head on Carlos’ shoulder when the two-block drive took three hours due to some _really lazy_ time. Cecil smiles, and it’s brilliant, not because of his bowed lips or the jags of his teeth but because he is who he is, and he always smiles like it means something.

“Carlos,” he says, breathless.

And though this is their fourteenth date, and they have kissed twenty-one times and made out six and fallen asleep holding hands on the couch twice, Carlos feels, sudden and acute, that he wants more. He stands on the edge of the horizon and feels the next frontier calling to him, the hot sand and brilliant mauve sky the chaotic swirl of time— or not-time— and then he’s reaching out to grasp Cecil’s wrist and saying, “I want to sleep with you, Cecil.”

For a moment, or several, Cecil is quiet. He blushes slowly, his tanned skin blooming darker with the blue blood beneath it. He swallows. 

“Well.” Cecil clears his throat. His hand twists beneath Carlos’s until they hold each others’ wrists, joined by the stutter-stop of their nervous pulses. “That would be. Groovy.” And his smile comes back.

Carlos huffs a small laugh. He feels the beginnings of his crow’s feet crinkle, and runs a thumb along the enigmatically hairless skin of Cecil’s wrist. He has never heard sexual intercourse called “groovy” before. He likes it.

“Of course,” Cecil says, a beat late with his brow folded, “you have already slept with me. On the couch, both of those times. But I guess we could do it on the bed. I’ll need to get another pillow. And last time I threw a party, I don’t know who preformed a sacrifice on my mattress, but I haven’t had a chance to ritually cleanse it yet and you _know_ how those bloodstones leave that humming sound so we should really get some ear plugs, or maybe—”

“Cecil— wait.”

Cecil’s eyes widen, milky and shining. He leans forward as his hand tightens on Carlos’s wrist. “Yes, dear Carlos.”

Carlos clears his throat. “By ‘sleep with you,’ I didn’t mean that we should temporarily suspend our consciousness while lying in a shared space. I meant I want to—” And suddenly he doesn’t know what to say. He almost said “have sexual intercourse with you,” but that doesn’t seem right. Not right at all. Carlos is a man of science, who cleaves to facts and terms and all the vernacular required to be precise. But emotions are not precise. That is why he has had so much trouble with them, why hearing Cecil’s adoration on the radio left him speechless the first several times, and why he rambled about science on their first date.

Science is who he is. Literally. He is _a scientist_. He is not a romantic. And that’s why this is so hard, because Cecil _is_ a romantic. He always knows what to say to make Carlos’s body warm and his chest fuzzy, and Carlos never knows how to do the same. He was the one who taught Carlos that science does not always take precedence over people, and if it does, he should call to cancel. This is his chance to make it up to him.

“I want to be with you,” he says, finally.

Cecil frowns. “You are with me.”

“Intimately, Cecil.”

“I—” Cecil draws his hand away, tucking it somewhere beneath the edge of the table. His brow is still all crinkled, and his brilliant eyes are drawing thin. “We’re already intimate. Aren’t we? I-I thought—”

“We are!” Carlos feels hot at the squeaky hint of desperation in his voice. “We are intimate, Cecil. And that’s why I’m asking. I. I want to have sex with you. That’s what I’m asking. I’m asking if you want to do that.”

Across the table, Cecil stares. He doesn’t usually blink, but right now he does. He swallows, a sharp jump of his Adam’s apple. “Seeex,” he says, in that long and sloping tone that usually indicates hesitant confusion.

“Yes. That.” Carlos sits back in wait for a response, feeling like his mouth is full of cotton balls, and something occurs to him. It’s a little ridiculous, and probably should be alarming, but his tolerance for alarm was hardened beyond the point of return after his second close call with cannibal grad students, so it’s actually pretty hard to tell. He asks anyway. 

“Cecil, do you know what sex is?”

“Psssh,” Cecil says, and waves one hand. “What is sex _really?_ Like, is it laying on the beach during low tide? Or perhaps it’s listening to the low, oaky tones of your soft-spoken partner. It could be the sulfur-and-viscera scent of a just-lit candle, or the ancient chants of a newly-purchased blender, or—”

It’s then that Carlos realizes his boyfriend _literally has no idea what sex is_.

“Cecil,” he says.

Cecil stops.

“It’s okay to tell me if you don’t know.”

“Oh. Well. _Ha,_ ” he says, and even though that last sound was probably supposed to be a laugh, he does _say_ it. He doesn’t laugh it. “I may not be too incredibly clear. On the specifics. But I know it’s a thing.”

“What do you know about it?”

The resulting silence is answer in itself.

Leaning forward across the table, Carlos reaches out until Cecil gives him his hand. He wraps their course fingers and sweaty palms up in each other, remaining leaned in, and nods for Cecil to join him. He does. They hang there for a moment, foreheads conspiratorially close, and Carlos glances around to make sure that there are no waitresses are coming to burrow into their ears for their orders. Assured he won’t be interrupted, he locks eyes with Cecil.

“Sex,” he murmurs, “is. Well. There is a scientific way to talk about it. But it’s more than that. It’s the way that two people get the closest they can possibly be— without possessing each other,” he adds, because Cecil looked like he was about to ask. “They put their bodies so close that one of them can be inside of the other.”

The inverted void of Cecil’s eyes churns. He shudders softly. “That sounds _wonderful_.”

“It is,” Carlos murmurs, though it’s not like he’s had a lot of experiences with it. But the idea of him and Cecil, Cecil and him… Yeah. “And it can feel really, really good.” 

“What would we need for it?” Cecil asks. “Any herbs? Or—”

“Nothing, Cecil,” Carlos murmurs. “Nothing but us.” He’s speaking very softly, with a smile almost as gentle as his voice. “It’s all the good things about the universe. It’s time, so fast when you look back, and- and so slow when you’re in the moment, and it’s two people but they’re just one person, separate but together, alone but not lonely, and the _bodies_ , Cecil, _our_ bodies, I—” He bites his lip, and his smile spreads. Cecil watches him, radiant and waiting.

“Would you sleep with me, Cecil?”

Cheeks dark with blood, face open with wonder, Cecil nods. “My- my dear Carlos. Yes. Of course. Just— just show me how.”


	2. Chapter 2

The two blocks back to Cecil’s apartment are much shorter this time.

They take the elevator up to the fifth floor, since the stairs have recently stopped existing between the second and the third, and Carlos waits while Cecil fumbles in his bag for the small knife he usually uses to paint a blood sigil on his door. Once, the first time he’d visited, Carlos had been concerned and asked why Cecil didn’t get a real lock, but the answer was long and anecdotal and involved ancient deities with squatter’s rights, so he let it go. Now, while he waits, Carlos is approached by a group of roaches who offer him pamphlets on gang violence. He attempts to accept one, as is polite, but accidentally crushes the tiny leaflet between his fingers, since it is literally made out of leaves. Then the whole thing is just _awkward_.

Luckily, Cecil is finished with painting symbols in his own blood and only has to intone a brief chant before they’re granted entrance. The apartment within isn’t so much an apartment as a set of rooms carved from stone, but the decor is tasteful, the moss-green walls (possibly paint, possibly actual moss) are pleasant, and there’s Scentsy burning somewhere, so Carlos doesn’t mind. 

Dropping his bag on the couch as he passes, Cecil heads immediately for the kitchen. “Brandy?” he asks as he reaches into the deep crevice that produces alcohol on Mondays and Fridays. 

Carlos approaches behind him. “I should stay sober. A scientist should always stay sober.” He watches Cecil pour a small amount into an animal skin pouch, then places a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he murmurs.

Cecil turns to look him in the eye, flushed and biting his lip. “Hey.”

“Come here.” Carlos takes Cecil's hands in his and guides them into his hair, shoulder-length and beginning to curl at the ends now that all the local barbers hiss and burrow into the earth when they see him coming. A deep hum of pleasure rings out of Cecil's throat. He presses with the pads of his fingers against Carlos's skull and runs his hands backwards, where they meet behind his head with dark locks woven between every finger. Carlos's hand eases up over the back of Cecil’s neck, and he pulls his boyfriend down the few short inches that separate their mouths. Though they have kissed twenty-seven times including make-outs now, this one is markedly different. Cecil angles Carlos's head sharply backward and presses into his space, much more eager to reciprocate when Carlos initiates something new: tongue, teeth, kisses straying across the face or down the neck. It’s just getting clammy and warm between then when Cecil jerks back with a sharp gasp, hands springing out of Carlos's hair as if bitten by skull-worms.

“ _Carlos_ ,” he breathes.

Cold with alarm, Carlos pulls away. “Cecil? What is it?”

“You weren’t— oh, my sweet Carlos, were you trying to start sex with me every time you kissed me with your tongue? And I didn’t know? Gosh, am I a lousy boyfriend or _what_?” He waxes casual over the last few words, but it’s obvious from the following uncomfortable chuckles that he really isn’t kidding.

Given what Cecil has in the way of facts (or lack thereof), this isn’t an illogical conclusion to come to, but Carlos is surprised to find that it saddens him. He is not used to being saddened by someone he loves. Though that is, perhaps, because he has never loved someone like he loves Cecil.

“Cecil, no. That was not what I meant.” Cecil’s mouth quirks, like he’s unsure, so Carlos continues. "In mating rituals between mammals— even lower mammals!— there are many steps to the process, and in higher species such as ourselves, sometimes we access one facet of the process with no intention to progress to the next, as an act of pair-bonding rather than seeking out any particular sexual act."

What he actually meant by that was, _I could kiss you until time unraveled and never expect you to give me anything more because I am desperately in love with you_ , but Cecil has that vague squint to his eyes and part to his lips that mean a whole bunch of science just flew over his head like a bird-of-prey helicopter. Carlos swallows. "To be physically intimate," he says, "there are a lot of steps people can go through. Sometimes kissing is the first step. But sometimes kissing is the only step, because people only want to kiss. I only wanted to kiss you, Cecil."

And, finally, Cecil breathes the soft, awe-filled "oh" that indicates they have found the delicate line between emotion and fact that sometimes separates them, and managed to grasp each others' hands as they balance on it. “I see. I wonder, could we—” Cecil swallows. “Could we skip the steps we’ve already done? Because right now, I- I feel like I want to be much, much closer to you.”

If _that_ doesn’t make Carlos’s throat dry. “Sure, Cecil,” he murmurs. He shrugs his lab coat off onto the counter, then takes his boyfriend by the hands and leads him to the bedroom. It’s a bit darker in there than in the rest of the house, and the bed does, in fact, hum, but it’s also warm in a comforting way, like the womb, or maybe something slightly less like a womb and more like someplace comfortable for two men to make love in. He leads Cecil to sit back on the fox-tail quilt draped across the bed, then stands looking down on him, both of them blushing ridiculously.

“Well,” Carlos murmurs. “The first step is taking off your clothes.”

That doesn’t need saying twice. Cecil draws a small breath, nods, then unties the belt of his tunic, allowing it to slide off his shoulders.

Carlos gasps. “Oh,” he says, very intelligently. “That’s incredible.” Cecil’s smooth torso is not fat and is not thin, but _definitely is_ covered in tattoos. In the divot of his solar plexus sits a glorious blue phacelia, and from it whorls endless wonders: cacti and swirling sands and more desert flowers than Carlos could name. He reaches out, sighing, and touches Cecil’s inked skin. One of them shivers in the ever slightest, but he cannot not tell who.

“When did you get this?” Carlos asks.

“I don’t remember,” Cecil murmurs. “But I think I want you to touch it more. Your hands are so—” he swallows. “Scientific.”

That makes Carlos blush. He lays his hands on Cecil’s shoulders, breathes, “Sure,” and begins to drag his fingers across his boyfriend’s body. Cecil is rapt in his attention, watching Carlos’s hands and breathing in the same slow, flowing rhythm that Carlos moves. He runs his nails over the delicate needles of the cacti, presses his thumbs into the texture of the sand. His knuckles follow the suggestion of ribs, and then, feeling brave, he brushes his fingers across Cecil’s nipples.

The sound Cecil makes is definitely not a moan. It is better. “Oh, _wow_ ,” he says. “Is that sex?”

Carlos nods, smiling. “That’s just the start.”

“I want to do it to you now,” says Cecil, and is standing up and going after the buttons on Carlos’s flannel before he can reply. “I want us to feel it together,” he continues, voice sliding lower. Then he pops the last button free, and stares wide-eyed as the shirt flutters to the ground (though it flaps a little harder and flies over to fold itself on the dresser instead).

“Beautiful Carlos.” 

Carlos has never thought of himself as particularly beautiful, not because he is unattractive but because he rarely thinks about beauty at all. But he sees himself as if for the first time with Cecil’s hands on him, the soft but muscled curves of his torso, the dusting of hair on his chest that tightens into a line down to his belly button. Cecil becomes particularly interested in this, touching it in long strokes from top to bottom. Carlos breathes a small, contented sound. Then Cecil is going for his nipples, brushing his fingers back and forth with genuine curiosity in the knit of his brow as the flesh erects and Carlos breathes a little harder. This continues, hands and chest and breathing, and Carlos would have been content to let it continue forever, but Cecil stops. He’s staring. At Carlos’ shorts. Carlos looks down too.

Oh. “Well,” Carlos says, then clears his throat. “That’s next. To have sex, you remove your clothing, and then you, uh. Get this. It’s called an erection.”

Cecil blinks, then touches the tented front of Carlos’s pants with hesitant fingers, making Carlos jump slightly. “What is it?”

“It’s—” he was going to say “a distended and rigid state of the penis,” but then he figured that wasn’t very romantic, or informative if you don’t know how sex works, so he just unbuttons his pants instead. He drops them at his feet, then does the same with his underwear. His half-hard cock falls free, and Cecil jumps back.

“Carlos!” he says, and that’s definitely the sound of alarm in his voice. “What _is_ that thing? Does it bite!?”

This is only slightly less mortifying than that time with Kelsey Fredric in eighth grade. Carlos clears his throat, and takes himself gently into one hand while rubbing at the back of his neck with the other. “It doesn’t bite. It’s just part of my body, Cecil. Do you—” and he definitely should have asked this long before now, “do you have one of these?”

Cecil shakes his head in the negative.

Whoops. “What… what do you have? If you. Uh. Don’t mind my asking.”

“Um.” Cecil steps closer again, unable to look away from Carlos’s cock, which is unfortunately becoming more shy the more uneasy Carlos feels. “I just thought I had the usual,” Cecil murmurs, and that’s when Carlos realizes his error.

He assumed that something about Night Vale was _normal_.

“Well, then.” Carlos steps forward into Cecil’s personal space. “A scientist is never afraid to explore.” And he slowly begins to unwrap the pelt that Cecil wears as pants. Cecil watches him for a moment, then grasps Carlos’s shoulders and begins to breathe a little harder.

“I don’t usually get stage fright,” Cecil says, and Carlos finds himself laughing, a sound that fills him and warms him and reminds him why he’s here, so close to Cecil, in the first place. 

“This won’t change anything,” Carlos murmurs, and then finally tugs the pelt loose. For a moment, he fears that he has made the most incredible mistake in his life by assuming that he and Cecil could have sex, because for a moment, it looks like Cecil’s pelvis dips into nothing but smooth, empty flesh between his legs. Then he sees the small slit. It’s about four inches long, placed roughly where a labia would be, but so flat and featureless that Carlos is fairly sure that’s not what it is. 

“What does this do?” Carlos asks.

Cecil swallows, then shrugs. “I don’t. I don’t know. I never use it.”

Carlos places his hand on Cecil’s hip, very aware of how still his boyfriend is beneath his fingers. “Have you touched it?”

“Only for cleaning.”

He looks Cecil in the eyes. “Can I?”

Cecil swallows hard, but he nods. “For science.” And he grins.

Chuckling softly, Carlos leans in to press a long, soft kiss against Cecil’s mouth, then his forehead, then his nose, and his mouth again. “Come sit with me.” He takes him by the hand and leads him to the bed, guiding him to sit. Cecil is staring at his cock as it’s begun to harden again, but he tries to ignore it, and instead coaxes his boyfriend to lie back. “Now spread your legs,” he instructs, “and I’m going to touch you there, okay? Tell me how it feels. If it feels uncomfortable, tell me to stop. Or. If you want to stop for any reason, I guess. Tell me. Okay, Cecil?”

Leaning back on his elbow, Cecil nods. “Of course, dear, sweet Carlos. I will.”

When Cecil spreads his legs apart, the slit pulls open slightly, revealing that it is definitely fleshy inside, dark and blue with blood-filled tissue. Gingerly, Carlos rubs his fingers over its edges, applying pressure here and there. Cecil’s body jerks, causing Carlos to look up in alarm, but his boyfriend is grinning, biting his lip.

“Tickles,” he giggles. 

Not really what he was going for. So Carlos slides his finger into the very top of the slit. “How’s that?”

“I don’t know.” Cecil’s voice is soft. “It feels… different.”

“I’m gonna put my finger in more, okay?” Cecil nods his consent, so Carlos begins to push his finger inside. Met with no resistance, he goes until his hand is flush with Cecil’s body. It’s very wet. “Good?” Cecil nods again, so Carlos presses a second finger inside. No resistance. A third. The fourth goes in just as easily.

A slow writhe starts at Cecil’s lower back and snakes into his hips. He licks his lips. “That’s good, Carlos. Oh— yes. Keep on doing. That.” 

So Carlos begins to move his fingers. He crooks them gently, taking cues from Cecil’s breathing and squirming and his quiet murmurs of, “Yes,” and, “That’s good right there,” and, “Wonderful Carlos.” He’s very wet inside, warm and soft and certainly fit for traditional penetration, so all seems well. Just as Carlos is about to remove his hand and suggest the idea of actual intercourse, his fingers curve into an odd crevice in the wall of Cecil’s opening— and Cecil arches and his head whips back like his spine is a live wire. He makes that noise from earlier, the one that is definitely not a moan because it is much better, and Carlos asks,

“There?”

“ _There_ ,” Cecil almost shouts, gasping. “Oh, _science!_ Oh, science, how you have blessed us all.”

Carlos’s cock pulses, because it is a universally known fact that radio hosts moaning about science is the hottest thing _ever_. Invigorated, he begins to explore the wonderful crevice inside of Cecil, and realizes quickly that he can slide his fingers around it, because it is not, in fact, a crevice. It is some kind of phallus, hidden against the wall of the passage, smooth and hard and extremely sensitive, if Cecil’s gasping is anything to go by. Almost without thinking, Carlos presses his thumb into Cecil’s opening, the lubrication taking it easily, and wraps his whole hand around the phallic organ inside Cecil’s body. 

“ _Oh_ —” Cecil gasps, and wails again, but this time he reaches up and grasps Carlos by the hair. “Carlos, perfect Carlos, _yes_. I-is this,” he makes a long, low sound as Carlos twists his hand around the smooth head of the organ, “is this it? Is this sex?”

Carlos is breathing very hard now. “Well, Cecil, sex is— it’s a lot of things. This is sex. But there’s also more sex. There’s— I mean, when I asked you to do this, there was another, uh, a more specific sexual act I was thinking of. And I. I want to do that with you now, if you want to.”

“Yes, Carlos. Lovely Carlos. Anything. Tell me.”

Reaching down, Carlos grasps his cock with his free hand. “I want to put this inside you.”

Cecil draws a trembling breath as his lips splay apart and his eyes, pure and bright and nothing at all like the void, grow wide. “Oh,” he breathes. “That makes so much sense.”

“Right?” Carlos asks, his heart like desert thunder against his ribs. “Isn’t the body amazing? It’s just— blood and flesh and electricity all working so well together, the way two creatures can fit like a variable into an equation, or like a a key and a lock, or—”

“Yes, sex. Is. _Wonderful_ ,” Cecil interrupts. “But I must admit, dear Carlos, that I’m more of a. A hands-on learner.” Sitting up now, he tangles his other hand into the uncut jungle of Carlos’s hair and fixes him with pleading eyes. “Experiments are _way_ better than lectures. If you know what I mean.”

Succumbing to the gentle pull of Cecil’s hands in his hair, Carlos gets properly onto the bed with his knees and plants his hands on either side of his boyfriend’s head. The mattress hums steadily beneath them, a buzz that rattles up into his bones. All at once, the whole situation wraps around him: the dark, clammy room and the blue-tan blush of Cecil’s skin and his shining eyes and the pull of the tendons in his neck as he gasps and the breathtaking sprawl of his floral tattoo which, come to think of it, seems to cover more of his body now than it did before, and just everything about this situation is—

“Perfect,” Carlos says. “I get it. When you say I’m prefect. Perfect is scientifically impossible, but this. You. I get it.”

Cecil kisses him, lips closed, on the corner of his mouth. “It’s because you _are_.”

With a smile so wide it almost hurts, Carlos grasps his cock and shifts his knees so that he’s close enough to press inside. He’s laying over Cecil now, one elbow supporting him and a hand pressed against his boyfriend’s neck, where he can feel his pulse and his breath and all of the things that mean he’s living and ready. He slips a finger into the warm slit to be sure that there’s still lubrication, and Cecil makes a small sound, eyes fluttering shut.

“Whenever you’re ready, sweet Carlos,” he says softly. “Let’s be close.”

For a brief moment of hesitation, Carlos wonders if he should worry about a condom, but he won’t soon forget the town-wide cleansing preformed by plague-masked witch doctors a few months ago, and besides that, he hasn’t slept with anyone in years and Cecil is a virgin in the most absolute sense, so they’re probably fine. Then he wonders if there’s some sort of paperwork he should be filling out and filing with the City Council at this point, but Cecil is making an exasperated _ugh_ sound and his erection kind of hurts, so those things can probably be dealt with later.

“Okay,” Carlos huffs as he lines himself up with the hand not supporting him. “I’m about to be inside you, Cecil.” Few things have ever tasted so smooth as his lover’s name in his mouth. He’s savoring that as he presses the head of his cock into the wet slit. Cecil gasps, not unpleasantly, and Carlos keeps going. Memories of his last sexual escapade are dim, but he knows for sure that this is the warmest and most welcoming place he’s ever found himself, like a deep, dark cave carved into an unforgiving slab of cold desert midnight, a place where both of them are safe and hidden. Then he takes one of Cecil’s hands in his and this becomes a quiet moment where no conviction of one is secret from the other, where every breath and movement is shared, where he can feel the almighty pulse of a heart between them and doesn’t know whose it is, or whether it’s both of theirs.

There is heat and movement, the race of hurricanes and the shift of tectonic plates, small gasps and low moans and Cecil panting “Carlos, Carlos, _Carlos_ ,” as his fingers tug Carlos’s hair. It’s no tango, no burlesque. An awkward middle school dance, perhaps, but still he holds Cecil close. He catches his boyfriend’s eyes shuttering at every brush of his mouth against his forehead, his neck, his nose. Inside of Cecil, Carlos’s cock grinds on the phallic organ, jarred by its pulses and throbs, while both of their members are squeezed by the muscled walls. Cecil twists his hips, corkscrewing them against each other and drawing a moan from Carlos. He’s close. Judging by his volume and the way his back curves off the bed, so is Cecil.

“You’re incredible, Cecil,” Carlos breathes into the definitely-growing bouquet of tattoo under his teeth. “Your— your body is incredible and I— I want to know you, to study you, to know you— ah— inside and out—”

“Carlos,” is all Cecil can say, faint and airy. 

“Of all of the— the incredibly scientifically interesting things in Night Vale, you, Cecil— oh—” God, this feels good, the heat and the tingle and the indescribable pleasure, “you are the most scientifically interesting thing I have ever seen.”

Just like that, Cecil’s body tightens into angles of corded muscle and shaking limbs and he makes a sound like every desert bird Carlos has ever heard as he experiences orgasm. He clenches tight around Carlos, and that’s it. The world bursts into omnipresent moonlight and the whip of the Aurora Borealis over arid winds and deep canyons with unspeakable horrors and wonders screaming at the bottom of them, and for a moment there is no such thing as a moment or time or air or anything other than the pleasure of something completely shared.

The world returns to Carlos in increments. Cecil’s heaving body beneath him. The dank room around them. The eternal hum of the mattress. And, finally, the feeling in his own extremities. He rolls off of his boyfriend and onto the sweat-damp animal pelt beneath them, then snuggles into Cecil’s side, tucked beneath the be-flowered weight of his shoulder.

Cecil lays there and heaves several breaths before saying, simply, “Neat.”

Carlos stares at the ceiling. He nods. “The neatest.” He wants to say more, to explain the particulars of what just happened or ask Cecil what his orgasm felt like, but everything is fuzzy at the edges, and he’s mostly sure that it isn’t because the moss on the walls grew while they were copulating. Far too heavy, his eyelids try to slide shut on him, but he resists. It’s a battle.

“Carlos,” Cecil breathes lowly. “My dear, sweet, lovely Carlos. It’s alright. Sleep with me. Or— well.” He runs his hand through the grey at Carlos’s temple, and kisses his forehead. “You know.”

Together they slip into the arms of shared temporary unconsciousness, and don’t even wake up when invisible, gnarled fingers pull Cecil’s fox-tail quilt over them. Above them spin the unexplained lights, enigmatic bursts of color against the inkblot of a horizon, a twinkling of mysteries that neither of them will ever solve, but it doesn’t matter.

All that matters is that they will both wake up next to the man they love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thinking about rewriting this second part. upon rereading, it came out weirder than i intended. idk.
> 
> anyways, thanks so much for reading! please drop a comment if you enjoyed it. (:


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> my hand slipped. occurs sometime around episode 51, _Rumbling_.

Carlos almost doesn’t hear the phone ringing. 

The wind whistles. The great masked army marches, thousands of heavy feet crunching against the sand. Distantly, birds scream. His ringtone is soft. It doesn’t stand a chance to the song of this eternal, sprawling wasteland, but still, he hears it.

He always hears it.

“Hello, this is Carlos the scientist.”

“ _Carlos_ ,” says Cecil on the other end. He is breathless. “ _Have you found a way home yet_?”

He has not. Right now he crouches in a shallow pit of tiny bones and holds a delicate skull in his free hand. Yesterday he walked among the masked warriors, asking for stories with which to weave a history for this sun-baked land. The day before that, he paced the desert with his phone held above his head to search for any change in the cellular reception.

He has not been looking for a way home.

“There is just so much here,” he says, and hopes Cecil will understand. “So much to explore, and to study, and to comprehend. So much to learn. I’ll come back home soon.”

There is silence on the line. The sound of shifting, and then a small breath. “ _I miss you, Carlos. The chair at the kitchen table that you prop your feet on misses you. Your toothbrush misses you._ ” A pause. “ _My body misses you._ ”

The tiny skull falls from Carlos’s fingers. He stands, back to the sun, and cradles the phone close to his ear. “Soon, Cecil. I just— I need more time. There’s still more to see, more to know.”

“ _You’ve said_.” There is a small note to Cecil’s voice, something petulant, that makes Carlos’s chest hurt.

He swallows. “I will come back to you, Cecil. I promise.”

“ _When?_ ” Cecil asks softly.

Carlos doesn’t have an answer.

“ _You know,_ ” Cecil murmurs, “ _when you snore, I can’t hear the mattress humming. But now I can hear it. It keeps me up all night._ ” He sighs, and it’s melodramatic, but it plays on Carlos’s guilt. “ _All I can do is lay awake and think about how cold I am on the side you always lay against. And, I- I—_ ” his voice skips over an uncharacteristic stutter. “ _I want you. I want to be close to you, and feel your body. It’s distracting, Carlos. I always feel so— so empty. And yet so full of want._ ”

Carlos’s heart is fluttering now. “I know what you mean.” And he does. It’s been only a faint worry here in this land of scientific potential, but when the sun starts to sink and Carlos sees the masked warriors retreating in pairs or threes to their quiet desert hollows, he feels acutely the kind of loneliness that can only be felt after very close companionship, born partly out of isolation and mostly out of absence. He really does miss being with Cecil. 

“ _I just want to be able to touch you_ ,” Cecil says like he aches. “ _And I want you to touch me. I want it so badly. Your mouth and your hands on my chest or my belly or between my legs, or— I don’t know, Carlos. Wherever you like. But I need to be touched._ ”

This is the part where, as the City Council’s informative pamphlet on long-distance sexual tension would put it, shit gets real. Carlos feels his first hot flare of arousal in weeks, and takes a seat in the sand. His shadow is long before him, so long that he wonders if he could walk its length and find Cecil at the end of it. 

“Have you touched yourself, Cecil?” he murmurs.

For a moment Cecil is quiet. Then he says, tone frank, “ _Well, duh._ ”

Carlos’s excitement flags a bit. “Oh. I see.”

“ _I mean, that seems pretty obvious. Don’t you all the time? Like, I had to brush my hair this morning, and at work I noticed I had that sixth toenail growing in again, so I had to dig that out. And_ …” he trails off. A moment passes. Just as Carlos is about to speak, Cecil makes a small “ _Oh,_ ” sound. “ _You meant have I touched myself **there**_.”

“Yes,” murmurs Carlos. His face feels hot, a phenomenon independent from the sun. “That was what I meant.”

“ _Well, that would be a little useless without you here, wouldn’t it?_ ”

Carlos feels his forehead crinkle up. “No, Cecil. You don’t need me there for that.”

“ _I’m. I’m not sure I follow, dear Carlos_ ,” Cecil says, tone caught somewhere between hesitancy and foreboding.

“I’m saying that you can do it by yourself, Cecil. Just you and your hand and maybe your imagination. You don’t need me there.”

Silence. The wind moans in the distance. Somewhere, something howls. Then, “ _Carlos. **Carlos**. **WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME ABOUT THIS, LIKE, THREE WEEKS AGO**?_ ” There’s a great shuffle on the other end of the line, like clothes crumpling. “ _ **THIS IS THE SORT OF INFORMATION I COULD HAVE BENEFITED FROM. AS A SCIENTIST, YOU ARE OBLIGATED TO EDUCATE THE PUBLIC SO THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE TO GO THROUGH THE FEAR AND HEARTACHE OF EDUCATING THEMSELVES. NOW, PLEASE TELL ME HOW TO DO THIS**_.”

Carlos swallows hard. “I'm sorry, Cecil. I would've-" 

" _It's fine, Carlos. Or, it will be. If you tell me. **Quickly**_."

"Okay. Yes, sure. Well, first, you’re supposed to think about things that excite you. Warm things, or gentle things. Or hot, rough things. Whatever you want.” Cecil moans, and Carlos is already getting hard. “Are you thinking about something?”

“ _Yes_.”

“Tell me.”

“ _I’m thinking,_ ” Cecil breathes, “ _that when I’m dead, I want to be cremated, and I want us to share an urn, where we will be wrapped up so close to each other that the archaeologists who find the urn will not be able to tell us apart, and we will stay that way forever, until the void has consumed all of time and space_.”

The idea of this makes Carlos’s heartbeat stutter, and he’s unsure if it’s fear or affection or arousal, or whether it really matters. “Usually,” he says, mouth dry, “people like to think of something sexual.”

“ _Oh, right. In that case, I’m thinking about your hands._ ”

Carlos nods and shifts in the sand, anticipation bubbling up in his pelvic cradle. “Good, Cecil. That’s good. What are my hands doing to you?”

He can _hear_ Cecil frown. “ _Nothing. They are in a dry desert other-world, attached to the rest of you. Unless. Oh, my God,_ ” his voice pitches up, “ _did you send me your hands?_ ”

“Um.” Carlos frowns out at the languishing afternoon, nibbled up at its edges by the beginning of a pink sunset. “No. My hands are still here, attached to my body, because that is where my hands belong. I meant, what are you imagining my hands doing to you?”

“ _Touching me, of course._ ”

“Where?”

Cecil’s voice drops low. “ _Inside._ ”

Carlos nods in encouragement, though he knows Cecil can’t see him. “Now you touch yourself, and pretend that it’s me. I’ll do the same.” He glances about, and seeing nothing but sand and sky, splays his legs outward and unzips his pants.

Suddenly the line fills with a low sound, thick and heavy, and Carlos is consumed by it for several moments before he realizes that it’s Cecil.

“ _Carlos,_ ” he whispers.

“Cecil.” He shoves his pants down, lays his warm hand against his underwear. “Tell me.”

“ _It feels like eating after a government-mandated fasting,_ ” Cecil says, voice low. “ _Your hand is wonderful, Carlos. I feel your fingers inside, and now you’re running them across my, uh, my_ —”

“Cock,” Carlos supplies, since a name for Cecil's anatomy has never come up between them, and he figures ‘internal phallic organ’ doesn’t roll off the tongue. “I’m touching your cock.”

“ _Yes, my cock. You’re running your fingers across my cock, up and down from the top to the bottom, and there’s this— ah— this, um, this little vein on the center of it that you’re touching, and it’s making me feel strange, like I’m turning inside out, like—_ ”

“Like what?” Carlos’s hand twists around the head of his erection. He gasps. “What does it feel like?”

“ _Weeell,_ ” says Cecil, tone abruptly different, “ _actually, this is new, and I don’t. I don’t know what to do._ ”

“What happened?”

“ _You were— well, I was touching myself, on that vein where it felt really good, and then my insides felt like they were moving, and now that whole part— my cock?— is starting to poke out of my body. It hasn’t. I mean. I didn’t know it could do that._ ”

Carlos swallows hard. “Keep touching that vein. For science.”

“ _For science,_ ” Cecil replies, and then begins to breathe harder. “ _Oh, yeah. Wow. Yes. Okay, good idea._ ”

“Tell me. Just keep telling me what’s happening.”

“ _I’m— no. You’re touching my cock, right along the vein where I can feel it all the way up my body, and it’s making my cock slide out of me. It’s longish, and smooth, and really dark blue. Almost black. It sort of curves, like— actually, it reminds me of the **BROWNSTONE SPIRE**._ ”

Previously on his way to being magnificently hard, Carlos lets go of his cock for a moment and clears his throat. “Cecil?”

“ _Yes?_ ”

“Please don’t call it that again.”

“ _Okay, yes. Anything, dear Carlos. Now you’re stroking it. My cock. It’s stiff and slick. It has a_ great _membrane. The whole thing is so smooth, Carlos, and your hand on it is making it pulse. Oh, yes, Carlos. That’s perfect._ ” 

The long, deep rumble of Cecil’s moan courses straight from the earpiece to Carlos’s cock, and without really thinking, he’s moving his hand backwards. “Cecil,” he gasps. “I want you to be inside of me. I want to be close to you again, in the bed, with the buzzing. Put your cock in me.”

“ _Carlos, yes. Okay. Yes. I’m grabbing your hair. **Hard**. And I’m spreading your legs apart and I’m kissing your imperfect face on that little scar below your right eye._ ”

“I’m shaking,” says Carlos, because he is. His finger is inside of him, and he can just imagine that it’s really Cecil, and that the sand at his back is a foxtail quilt, and that the heat of the sun is his boyfriend’s body. “You’re pulling on my hair. I’m open for you. I’m laying back while you kiss me, and I’m gasping because my heart is racing and there is a small, confused part in my peripheral nervous system that thinks I’m running for my life because my heart is beating so hard. That part of my peripheral nervous system is pumping adrenaline through me, and the adrenaline is rushing because it thinks I’m maybe about to die. But that’s okay, because if that was the case, this would not be a bad place to die. It is a beautiful place to die.”

“ _I’m inside of you, Carlos,_ ” Cecil gasps, “ _and I love you. Oh, God, I love you, beautiful Carlos._ ”

“I love you, too, Cecil,” Carlos pants. He pushes another finger into himself. His neck aches, crooked to hold the phone to his ear while his other hand pulls at his cock. One of his fingers presses into his prostate, and he cries out. “Cecil!”

“ _Yes, yes, beautiful Carlos. Yes. I’m— I’m going to come inside of you._ ”

“Do it,” Carlos gasps. His prostate lights up like a vague, yet menacing government agency throwing the self-destruct switch on one of its nuclear testing silos, and he can almost feel Cecil there, touching him, filling him. “Cecil, _Cecil_ — I’m—” the excitement flurrying through his body drops down into his pelvis, where it melds and bursts and burns and dies, a supernova to the sounds of Cecil gasping his name in a distant realm.

And all is quiet in the desert.

“ _Thank you, Carlos_ ,” Cecil says, finally.

Carlos sits up slowly. His eyes are bleary, blinking against the sky. The sun is half-gone, wreathed by purple and pink and orange and mauve and two or three colors that Carlos does not have a name for. Color-damp clouds swipe across the horizon. Cecil gasps with a shaking rhythm in his ear, and between the two of them, they weave a soft song of shared breath.

“I’m going to find a way home,” Carlos says softly. “I’m going to come back to you.”

“ _Even if you never do_ ,” Cecil whispers, “ _I will always love you._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, please comment if you liked it! i may add more if i am inspired to do so.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i was going to wait until Carlos canonically returned to Night Vale to write this chapter, but then i figured that nobody's really reading this for the plot, so. (;

It is Carlos’s third night home before he crawls into bed and does not fall asleep immediately. He lays there a moment between the buzz of the mattress and the warmth of the quilt, and genuinely expects sleep to come. His eyes even close, valiantly. In the darkness, he seeks oblivion but is met instead by phosphene that dances, purple and blue and white, across the backs of his eyelids. As has happened more and more since he returned from the desert, the neurons continue to fire uselessly, until his visual cortex is a fireworks show and it is darker to simply open his eyes again.

Cecil sits on the other side of the bed. Carlos did not hear him enter; he never makes a sound when walking, like the creaks between his foot and the floorboard are too intimate to be heard. This might actually be the case. Carlos has never thought to ask about the social ties of Cecil’s feet, but they could very well be a thing that exists.

The bed shudders as Cecil stretches and yawns a wide dog-yawn that pulls his jaw just a little too open. Then he goes limp, becomes a congregation of soft angles backlit by almost nothing. He swings his legs onto the bed, and sighs in a forlorn way that he would not stoop to if he had yet noticed that Carlos was awake; he must think his scientist is asleep, still exhausted by his accidental sabbatical.

Except it wasn’t accidental, not really. Carlos never meant to end up trapped in an Unforgiving Desert Otherworld, of course. But it wasn’t like he’d scrambled to get back home. He had stayed on purpose, at least for a while. He _is_ glad to be back home, and that should count for something, but his chest is still heavy with things he can’t quantify or convey. He’s glad that, even though he is not the same Carlos that left— he’s darker and wiser and sadder, and are we all really the same person for more than a few thoughts anyway?— this place still allows itself to be his home.

Cecil still allows this to be his home.

“You should give yourself a break,” comes rolling across the bed, deep and slow and like something living settling down for a long snooze between them.

Carlos descends from wherever he’d been inside his head, and can just focus on the easy curves of Cecil’s face in the dark.

“A break?” he asks.

“From thinking,” Cecil says, and one corner of his mouth gives toward a smile. “A hobby is best when occasional.”

It should probably bother Carlos that the man he loves categorizes thinking as a hobby and not, say, a basic function of existence, but it doesn’t. It makes him turn his face into the pillow and breathe out a laugh like a besotted school child, because that is just how much he’d missed Cecil. He pushes himself up on his elbows, head still hanging.

“You’re right.”

Then he drags himself over to Cecil’s side and presses a kiss into his cheek. A contented noise escapes Cecil’s parted lips, and he chases it to the corner of Carlos’s eye, where he kisses the premature crow’s feet that have cut, unforgiving, into dark skin. They turn toward each other, up on elbows, and the blanket gathers around Carlos’s waist. Carlos wears a thin night shirt with his boxers, but Cecil is still in the pants he wore today, and nothing else.

Carlos shifts up to sitting, then kicks the blanket down to the foot of the bed. He runs his hands into the valleys of Cecil’s bare torso, and smiles at the flow of tattoo that chases his nails, petals and grains of sand scattered as if he has pressed his very fingers into Cecil’s skin to stir them up. Something rumbles below his hands, a deep chest-noise, then Cecil sits up and pulls Carlos’s head toward him by handfulls of hair.

“I want,” Cecil says lowly, and finishes the thought by pressing his face to Carlos’s. They kiss open-mouthed and mostly with lips, pressing and sucking at the soft inside-flesh of each other’s intimate grins until Cecil begins to bite. He bites as he does everything, with earnest enthusiasm: the upper corner of Carlos’s lip, the underside of his chin where his jaw tightens into an angle, then the vulnerable corner of his neck beneath his hairline.

“Nnh,” is all Carlos has to say about that.

Tongue-first, Cecil rises from Carlos’s neck back to his mouth, and licks up Carlos’s teeth into the hollow of his gums in a way that is not so much sexy as it is exhilarating. Excitement fills his lungs, and his hands leap to Cecil’s head where his thumbs can slide snugly behind Cecil’s ears. Cecil draws back, eyes wide and waiting, and Carlos loves him. He loves him so much.

He says, breathless with affection the likes of which could likely kill any spirit that might be encroaching on either of their souls, “Let me show you something new, Cecil.” 

“Yes,” Cecil replies without a Planck of deliberation, “anything.”

A thrill fluttering between his ribs, Carlos presses Cecil down to the bed by a hand to his sternum. “I’ll do everything. You just lay back and enjoy it. You’re going to enjoy to so much. I mean, I hope you enjoy it. You probably will. It’s likely.”

“Yes, yes, I will,” Cecil says, breathless, like Carlos had said something seductive and not stumbling. Come to think of it, Cecil may find stumbling seductive. That would explain a lot.

“Okay—” and Carlos peels off Cecil’s furry pants in one go. They’re the deer pelt ones he wore on their first date, tastefully mottled by fawn’s spots and actually still alive by all indications, so Carlos tosses them across the room as not to invite voyeurism. Cecil’s legs splay apart immediately and his hips shift forward. He’s smiling more widely than is usually considered erotic, but Carlos loves it. Without wasting a moment, he presses a finger into Cecil, finding him warm and wet, then follows with one digit at a time until his hand is entirely enveloped. He wraps his fist around the cock inside and elicits a sharp gasp. Though he has no pupil or iris, Cecil’s eyes visibly roll backwards, perhaps a complete 360. Whatever the case, his enjoyment is obvious.

“Love it when you do that,” he breathes. “So perfect.”

“Just wait.” He turns his wrist and searches with his fingers until he finds the vein on the front of Cecil’s cock, the very exciting, convenient vein that they are both currently quite glad that Cecil discovered. With each pass of his fingertips over the vein, Cecil’s cock shifts and slides until Carlos has coaxed it out of the opening, just the smooth head. Cecil looks down, breathes out a shuddery sound.

“That feels—” he inhales sharply, “—different.”

The opportunity for new data jumps in Carlos’s stomach. He watches Cecil’s face as he continues to stroke his cock. “Different how?”

For a moment Cecil doesn’t answer, eyes closed and mouth open, then he gasps out, “From when I do it.”

Carlos pauses in drawing the cock out and rubs his thumb lightly against its undefined head. “How does it feel when you do it, Cecil?”

“It’s— mh— not as tingly. More like stretching, you know? But this— ye _ah_. Different. Good-different.”

It’s almost fully out now, about the average length, thin but curved very nicely and colored the dark and endearing blue of Cecil’s blood, almost black at the tip. The whole organ is quite smooth and featureless aside from color. It has a particularly nice membrane, as Cecil had assured him. Glossy. The absence of testicles is aesthetically interesting; the base of the organ vanishes instead into Cecil’s opening, which is stretched at one end by the protrusion. Carlos catalogs all of this carefully, fully intending to take notes and draw diagrams later.

“So, um,” Cecil says with a strong hint of uptalk, “were you going to show me something new, ooor…?”

Carlos is pulled from his clinical observation and back into the moment, where he is crouched between the open sprawl of his naked boyfriend’s legs, and it hits him like a driver with stop sign immunity just what exactly he was doing here. “Right,” he says. 

And he goes down on Cecil.

Cecil’s pelvis jerks away then forward, and both of them choke a little, but Carlos recovers first. He grasps Cecil by the hips and pulls himself forward to angle his throat more directly. He tastes like absolutely nothing. Maybe like the cleanest water Carlos has ever drunk, but that's a stretch. Cecil is gasping.

“Carlos— Carlos, _sweet unholy abomination, Carlos_ what— what are you _doing_?”

Only after a slow drag of tongue does Carlos pull off, and he’s unable to keep from smiling desperately at Cecil’s expression, which can be described as nothing short of “a little horny; mainly impressed.”

“It’s called oral stimulation,” he says, and wastes no time in wrapping his lips around the head to suck.

Cecil keens; this is to say that he literally makes a sound as might be heard in lament for the dead. It should probably be off-putting, but so should having a partner with secret genitals, so Carlos rolls with it. Encouraged, he takes as much of Cecil into his mouth as he can (which is not a whole lot, because he’s done this exactly zero times and doesn’t want to gag again) then sucks. The whole situation is very inexpert, but if the hands in his hair and the key of Cecil’s moan are any indication, expertise is of no consequence here.

“This is the best idea that anyone has had since the eldritch beings that formed the universe chose to place the curse upon the earth that produced Night Vale itself,” Cecil breathes in an impressive display of articulation, then moans again. Carlos laughs around his cock, which produces an answering giggle. He rises off and licks around the head exhibition-like, then slides his tongue down to the base. Cecil gasps.

“Oh, _there_. There. Yes, that place. That one.”

“This place here?” Carlos asks in earnest, breathing hot over the taut skin that connects the base of the phallus to the inner chamber. 

Cecil’s head falls back as if dejected. “ _Ugh_ ,” he says, but with enough passion to convey that yes, that is the place there.

“Right,” murmurs Carlos, and crooks his head to suck on that area. Instantly Cecil jerks off the bed. Curling in over himself, he grips Carlos by the shoulders and keens again. Hoping that keening is, in fact, a good sound, Carlos bites gently at the spot. He gets a shout for his troubles.

“You like that,” he murmurs. Cecil nods aggressively. “Good.” And Carlos begins to explore the flared-open slit with his tongue. Nails dig into his back, Cecil hanging on for dear life. The skin is so wet that it squishes, and very blue, and very hot. Cecil’s cock falls against Carlos’s face, bumping his nose and streaking wetness across his forehead. The secretions come from the membrane, a thick liquid likely meant to be a lubricant, which makes Carlos believe that Cecil could probably penetrate him quite comfortably without additional— oh. _Oh_ , Carlos has just realized that he is incredibly hard in his yet-unshed boxers. Apparently Carlos’s arousal is directly connected to the idea of being penetrated by Cecil. Good to know. He sighs and presses his face flush against Cecil, smelling ozone and sweat and the standard clove-scented cologne issued to all males over 30, and he knows he was a fool for staying gone even a second longer than he should have.

“Carlos,” Cecil gasps. His hands run up Carlos’s back and into his hair and down again. “You’re so beautiful and wonderful and perfect and _terrible_. You should see yourself, with your hair all everywhere and my— ah— my cock on your face and your tongue inside of me, and— _golly_ , you’re pretty. Have I told you that?”

“You have. So, so many times,” Carlos answers, voice fond but muffled. He sucks at the sensitive place for another strange and awful moan, then rises up Cecil’s body with his mouth skidding lazily across whatever sticks out until they’re lip-to-lip. “I want you to be inside of me, Cecil,” he breathes into his boyfriend’s mouth. “I want to feel you from the inside and have your body heavy on top of mine and get that big rush of oxytocin that lets every neuron know that you love me. I want that. I want you.”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Cecil, knee-jerk. “Carlos. Precious Carlos, I would be _honored_.” And there is a weight to his voice that says, yes, _honored_ is not an exaggeration. Carlos grins ridiculously and steps backwards off the bed. He drops his shorts and, an afterthought, rips his shirt over his head. Cecil’s face lights up when he does this, presumably not because of all the skin but because of the many directions Carlos’s hair goes. “Carlos,” he says, and Carlos will never get tired of hearing Cecil say his name. 

Cecil’s squarish palms land flat on Carlos’s hips and pull him forward. With only a bit of a stumble, Carlos gets knees-first onto the bed, then shifts forward until he’s knelt chest-to-face in front of his boyfriend. The grin that pulls Cecil’s lips is distantly registered by Carlos’s brain as terrifying, and this only feeds his excitement as that grin slides down his chest to the ever-so-slight pudge of his belly. A sigh of content, a flutter of lashes, and Cecil’s eyes roll up behind his closing eyelids, a gesture so stupidly genuine that Carlos’s chest gets all tight. Cecil kisses him at the vee of his hips, low enough to tickle the hair but not nearly close enough to his cock.

Breathing uneven with emotion, Carlos ruins Cecil’s combed hair with purposeful fingers. He clutches Cecil by the base of the neck, and means it. “A scientist gets his priorities crossed sometimes,” he says before he loses the nerve.

Through the flick of his lashes, Cecil fixes him with shining eyes and a knowingly coked eyebrow. “I had figured,” rumbles against Carlos’s pelvis. Cecil’s hands slide backwards from Carlos’s hips simultaneously to spread his buttocks apart, and then there are fingertips against a very private place, and he is gasping despite himself. This is not the first time Cecil has touched him here; the first was due to curiosity on Cecil’s part (“What’s this for?” “Oh. Uh, well, normally, it’s actually used for, well, uh—” “Is it the sort of place I can put my fingers into?” “ _Yes_. Yes. Just let me, uh. Make sure it’s sanitary.”) and subsequent times had been due to Carlos’s encouragement, but this is the first time that Cecil’s fingers have been the means to an end. The prelude only, as it were. The fact that Cecil’s intentions go further really has Carlos’s heart doing a number, like actually a tap-dance number, or maybe a number in the official Night Vale language of dance that means, “I want this but I didn’t consider how I’d feel when I finally got it.”

There is a finger inside of him, and a thumb rubbing at his rim.

“You’re thinking thoughts,” Cecil says in a bedroom voice that keeps the statement from being a sexual non-sequitur. (A non-sexquiter? No. Yikes. That’s awful. He really needs to get his pun vaccinations updated.)

Carlos swallows and nods. “I am.”

“What kind of thoughts?” And there’s no mistaking the deep note of invite in Cecil’s voice. He wants Carlos to talk about this, to describe it from his end like he sometimes asks Cecil to do— and Carlos wants to, he does. But he’s not so good at that. Sometimes the right words will just well up in him, the kinds of words that hit the backs of his teeth in a jumble and _insist_ on being spoken, but that’s only sometimes. The rest of the time he is quiet, or else saying something stupid or scientific that Cecil only finds appealing because of his frankly impressive bias. Carlos wants to say a great thing, a sexy thing that will shock Cecil in the best kind of way, but he’s drawing a blank. Instead, he bends to wrap his arms around Cecil’s shoulders and presses back against the fingers inside of him, forcing out a long, low shudder. There are two fingers now, and the blunt tip of a third inside.

“Incomplete thoughts, because it’s hard to think when I know you’re going to be inside me soon.”

Cecil breathes a sharp _oh_ , then rises to kiss Carlos hard on the mouth. Hardly has the kiss been returned, and he moves with a twist of the sheets and a hand on Carlos’s lower back to get behind him. Carlos calls it an unexpected win and goes down on his hands and knees.

Cecil spreads his fingers inside of Carlos and asks, “Are you ready enough?” Carlos doesn’t answer, mostly because he is wondering if he should explain the exact mechanics of this to Cecil— but then he supposes it’s not hugely different from the acts of penetration they’ve preformed so far, plus Cecil’s cock is already incredibly wet with natural lubricant (he can feel it against him), and the rest is a blend of instinct and common sense, so—

“Carlos? Are you—?”

“Cecil,” he says, and sinks down on his elbows with his ass raised in answer. “Just not too fast.”

A tight pause between them. Air waiting. Mattress buzzing. Somewhere, at least one and a half people are dying. Then Cecil begins to press inside of Carlos. He is, as asked, not fast, and waits with just the tip inside and a hand spread lovingly on the small of Carlos’s back until they have both gotten over the initial shock of the experience, as indicated to each other by small nods and gasps of, “You’re good?” “I’m good.” It occurs to Carlos then how vulnerable Cecil must have been their first time, to let Carlos be inside of him like this without any hesitancy, especially lacking any knowledge or expectations about sex. Or perhaps that last part made it easier. Regardless, it seems all the more incredible with his own heart racing and Cecil barely beginning to enter him.

“Um,” he breathes, “my answer before may have been unclear, and for that I apologize. In fact, I— I use all of my city mandated apologies for this month, but please— you don’t have to go _that_ slow. I’m ready. I’m so ready. Very, very ready.”

“Carlos,” Cecil says, and wow, just that word is starting contain multitudes: it is legion and it has possessed Cecil, evident in the reverence of his hand as it runs down Carlos’s back to the same slow slide of his cock going deeper. He makes a low sound that vibrates more than anything. Carlos loves it. 

He murmurs encouragement between whispers of Cecil’s name until finally Cecil is as deep in as he can go, and his hand has slipped down around Carlos to rest against his sternum. Carlos breathes heavily, revels in being wrapped around and wrapped up in his boyfriend, and trembles a little at the legs. He has never done this before. The feeling has an edge of burn and registers more as neutral than pleasurable, but he likes it. He makes a small sound as the angle changes inside of him: Cecil has bent down, chest to back. His whole arm wraps around Carlos’s front now, clutching him close. He remains still.

As sweet as this is, Carlos realizes abruptly that he is having none of it. He twists back, pushing into Cecil and intoning a (slightly theatrical) moan. “Move now,” he gasps.

This is all the prompting Cecil requires, apparently. He is still and then suddenly he is not. His cock draws back and then pushes deeper, further out then further in, entirely out and then— “Cec—!” the unnecessary edges of Carlos’s world chip and shatter off. He’s not even sure where Cecil is getting the leverage at the angle of this position, and it probably involves dark magic but he can’t bring himself to care, because “Ah—” did he have a conclusion for that thought? Cecil makes extravagant sounds, gasping punched-out little moans every time their bodies meet the resistance of each other.

“Beautiful Carlos,” Cecil breathes against his neck with all the heat of a five-headed mayoral candidate, “I love you. You feel so, so good, and tight, and being inside of you is like finding an unopened love letter, because nothing between us has changed, but now— oh, yeah, gosh— now I know you more. You are so, so—” and Carlos expects him to say perfect, or wonderful, or lovely, or some word that Cecil has called him so many times that Carlos has forgotten what it actually means. But then Cecil says,

“—home. You are home.”

And Carlos’s elbows drop, one hand gone to clasp Cecil’s and the other slid uselessly out in front of him, fisting the sheet. “Cecil,” he sobs more than says, and Cecil clutches him harder and kisses his neck but doesn’t stop rocking into him. Without preamble, Cecil spits in his hand, reaches for Carlos’s cock and pumps it. Carlos makes a noise like dying. He lets go of the sheet and clutches the wrist of Cecil’s moving hand. He means to say something sexy and encouraging, but words fail him and he ends up making a sad sort of sound, strung out by want and pleasure and a pain in the pit of his chest.

Cecil may have had rhythm at some point but doesn’t now, pushing unevenly in and out of his boyfriend’s body as his throat hums louder and stranger. “Carlos, _Carlos_ —” He pulls at Carlos’s cock, pressure here and a gentle thumb there, and this combined with the feeling of him hard and smooth inside leaves Carlos done for. Pleasure tightens the base of his spine. He collapses, mouth open, throat scraping; at some point Cecil slips out, and next Carlos knows, he’s on his side with a stripe of his own ejaculation already cooling on his chest, unable to pull a deep enough breath. Cecil’s star-white eyes are wide as he stares down, lips slightly parted. There is a suggestion of worship on the cusp of his open mouth, but he says nothing. Carlos is thankful; he doesn’t think he could take that right now. He feels as if something beautiful has been taken from him, and that he has been made to forget what it was so that he won’t have to live out the rest of his days in the agony of knowing he can never see that beautiful thing again.

“You can finish,” Carlos murmurs. Cecil nods with the same reverence as before and says something too quiet to hear (Carlos blushes hotter regardless) before he takes one of Carlos’s legs to spread him open. He pulls the leg to his front, parallel as it will go, and presses inside again. This time the whole thing is very out of body; Carlos is loose-limbed and warm-chested and a little sore, but he watches this unfold from somewhere else, a place where his affection for Cecil is so thick that he can hardly breathe through it. He watches the snap of Cecil’s body as he pushes in, the furrow of Cecil’s brow as he gets close, the press of Cecil’s lips against the coarse hair of Carlos’s leg. Then Cecil's eyes flick open, distant and brilliant, and he says Carlos’s name higher with every gasp, like ascension— and goes very still. A moment later, he’s heaving air, pulling out, letting Carlos’s leg drop. He remains kneeling, but wilts, spent.

"Hey,” Carlos murmurs, and reaches up to pull him down by the back of the neck. Cecil succumbs to the touch and allows Carlos to guide him close, where he snuggles into his side, nose against the stubble of Carlos's under-jaw. He breathes a sigh that sounds like belonging, and Carlos has to knuckle the wetness from one of his eyes.

"Stop that," Cecil whispers against his skin.

Carlos lays his cheek against the top of Cecil's head. "Stop what?"

"Brooding. I can hear it. It's making this sort of," he grinds out a low, scraping growl, "sound, and it's _ruining_ my afterglow." 

A small laugh puffs unbidden from Carlos's chest. He scratches lazily at the hair on Cecil's nape, which is long enough to curl around Carlos's fingers. It was the same length when he left; Cecil's gotten it cut and let it get scruffy again, all in the time of his absence. Or maybe Cecil's hair has just spontaneously stopped growing. They're equally likely.

"I just," Carlos says, then stops. There is nothing "just" about what he's feeling. It is bigger and louder and hungrier than a "just" at the beginning of a statement can contain.

"I know that it meant a lot to you," Cecil says. In Carlos's curious silence, Cecil traces his finger along the funneled line of Carlos's chest hair. "Staying. Doing science. All of that." He kisses the crook of Carlos's neck. "I didn't like giving you up for that long. But as much as I wish I did, I don't have exclusive claim over you, sweet Carlos. It would be unfair to covet you away from your passions. Or, for that matter, the rest of the universe. So please, stop feeling awful." He pulls himself up onto Carlos's chest, and pillows his chin on his folded hands. His eyelashes flutter. "If you continue to feel awful, and you stop smiling, what in the world will I have to look at?"

Carlos chokes out a laugh, and pushes the fresh swell of wetness from his eyes. 

Maybe Cecil is the beautiful thing he lost. He could bear never having Cecil again, so long as he could remember that he had him once. 

That's probably why he stayed so long in the desert: he was content. He just forgot could be _happy_.

"I'm still sorry," he whispers.

Cecil shakes his head, grinning, and then pushes his hands up Carlos's arms until their fingers thread together. "Your apology is accepted," he murmurs, then kisses Carlos's cheek, "as long as next time, you take me with you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _keen_  
>  noun  
> 1.  
> a wailing lament for the dead.  
> verb  
> 2.  
> to wail in lamentation for the dead.
> 
> the more you know. (;


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm not going to call it plot, but there is a little more substance in this chapter. mild Night Vale horror?? a vague tie-in with the mysteries currently popping up in canon???? Cecil's exes????????? all this and more in the thrilling conclusion of the biggest guilty pleasure i have ever written.

It is three days since Cecil asked the question. Carlos sits before his desk, the toe of his dress shoe tucked behind the chair-leg to balance him as he leans over an abyss of scribbled notes. He jots down every last modicum of information he can come up with, a distant memory here and a fancy too vague to be called a hypothesis there, page after page of sentiment-saturated study. He wants to be thorough. No facet untouched, nothing left unconsidered. There is no wrong answer to the question, but he feels, as most intellectuals are wont, that there will be one answer that is simply _more right_ than all the others.

Cecil asked him on the latter end of a double-Monday, when the desert wind was uncharacteristically generous and the sun lounged gently among long-unseen clouds. They walked to work together that day, Cecil being called in early and Carlos late, fingers brushing as their hands swung and sometimes grasped each other for a few minutes at a time. Where the sidewalk split, creating an additional road with no obvious entrance, Cecil stopped and turned to Carlos. His eyes harbored a certain sentimentality, which was not unusual, yet his hesitation to speak was. It was common for Cecil to hem and haw around a point, but his total silence brought Carlos’s concerned hand to his shoulder.

“Cecil?” Carlos’s eyebrows peaked inward, at once drawing together all the lines of his face to the single purpose of sympathy. “Are you alright?”

Cecil’s smile was grateful. “I’m fine,” he said, and lay his hand on Carlos’s. “I just wanted to ask you something, and— well, I don’t want to ask too much. You’re so good to me, and I—”

“Anything.” Smiling, Carlos pressed his thumb in a circle against Cecil’s trapezius muscle.

Grinning now, Cecil bounced a bit and breathed a relieved “Okay.” The enthusiasm in his tone was infectious, causing Carlos’s face and body to loosen. He stepped back, ready for whatever Cecil was about to ask, and tried not to feel too much anticipation. 

“So,” Cecil put his hands out as if to ground himself, visibly moved by his excitement (as in, literally floating a little). "I just have to know. What do I look like?”

Silence. A few birds landed and stared. A secret police agent leaned blatantly out of a nearby bush, incredulous and having left her binoculars hanging around her neck to give a _seriously?_ gesture with a shrugged shoulder and a raised hand. Carlos stared at Cecil.

“You don’t know what you look like?”

“Wh-e-ll-ll, I mean, a vague idea.” Cecil raked a hand backwards through his hair, then on some kind of afterthought grabbed a longer strand and pulled it outward. “I mean, I know my hair is black and my skin is dark, and I have a general notion from this angle that I am a bipedal humanoid mammal, and of course I know exactly what color my eyes are because I have to order new ones every six weeks and I see them before I take the old ones out, and I can sort of see my nose? But I don’t really _know_ , because as a young man my mother told me I’d die a horrible death having to do with mirrors, and then after her passing I could never really bear to— Carlos, what are you doing?”

Carlos wasn't necessarily listening. As a thoughtful and introspective person it was impossible to actually listen to _everything_ Cecil ever said, and at the moment he had instead taken several steps back and was in the process of framing Cecil for a photo with his cell phone. There was a simple solution here, and frankly he was a little disappointed that Cecil hadn’t come up with it himself. Of course there was a selfie ban, and certainly neither of them wanted Cecil to have his facial feature permit revoked (the usual sentence for selfies), but would it really have been that hard to ask Carlos for a photo?

Picture snapped, Carlos said, “Here you go,” and handed the phone off. 

The grin fell from Cecil’s face, but he took the phone anyway. He shook his head when he saw the screen. “Of course,” he muttered, and then handed it back.

Carlos received the phone, blinked at it, and knew that this should not surprise him. The photo retained its original backdrop, a desert metropolis rendered sluggish beneath the first partly cloudy day in some months, and Carlos’s thumb could be seen in the corner, and even Cecil’s snake skin shoes were still visible. But where there should have been the rest of Cecil, there was a vertical censor bar garnished by indistinguishable runes.

“It can never be simple, can it,” Carlos said. 

And that’s how he’s ended up hippocampus-deep in an attempt to lay out anything Cecil could ever want to know about his own appearance. Pages are filled with poorly conceived gesture sketches, a poem he tried to write about Cecil’s body at 2 AM after a bad day lead to drunken sex, and everything in between. Cecil’s supposed to be home early for x-rays, because Carlos is pretty sure that’s the closest he can get to a photograph. Maybe he’s being a bit excessive, but he’s been meaning to get Cecil’s insides on film for a long time. Don’t all couples get that done at some point?

He had actually intended to get all of the x-rays done last night, but didn't; when the first scan revealed that someone had scooped out what should have been Cecil's reproductive system and left the cavity full of scar tissue and a plastic tab saying _DONT ASK QUESTIONS_ in cut out block text, the evening came to a screeching halt. Carlos was shocked and disconcerted almost to the point of hysteria, but Cecil seemed unaffected. He suggested they have a movie night instead. Carlos can’t remember what movie they watched, only that Cecil’s body was warm and the popcorn was stale, and that he spent the whole night preparing to throw himself down the rabbit hole of Night Vale’s sexuality and reproduction.

Of course, the first thing he did was ask questions— as much as a local celebrity can, when the questions are possible involuntary government organ harvesting. He took to the street the next morning before Cecil woke up, wielding a clipboard and a brief spiel about the importance of surveys and polls in science. Many of his inquiries were met with confusion, or citations of city curiosity policy, or bowel-curdling shrieks. Most who actually answered him reported never thinking twice about reproduction, saying that their offspring would spawn in the correct season regardless, and a few recalled their insides being legally possessed, but no one thought any of it odd. 

Naturally. 

Disturbed as he was by his findings, in the end, as with many things, he had to simply shake his head and say, “Damn it, Night Vale.” Now, at least for the time being, he’s put the bulk of it aside to focus on Cecil specifically, because that’s what all this was about in the first place. Incapable of changing tracks completely, he tries to settle himself down by filling in his notes about Cecil’s genitals. First, he takes inventory. While there are existing names for what’s happening down in his boyfriend’s nether regions, he feels the need to invent some vocabulary of his own, among which he has some favorites:

 _Poterentur Absconditum_ : Literally "secret penis." Carlos will never tell Cecil this, because inevitably Cecil will say it during sex and the mood will be ruined for the foreseeable future.

 _Clitoris Inturuptus_ : Referring to the tissue filled with clitoris-like nerve endings that connects the phallus to the inner chamber. Never let it be said that Carlos doesn't have a sense of humor. 

He follows this with some rather decently drawn diagrams, and a page or two of observations on the equipment when in action. It is at this point that Carlos has to sit back and tell himself that he isn’t being _weird_ about it. Sure, there are now four pages in his favorite spiral-bound devoted entirely to this matter, but this notebook does have three hundred and forty-one more pages filled with things that are not Cecil's genitals, and Carlos has hundreds upon hundreds of other notebooks that are not concerned with Cecil at all. 

(This is to say that, yes, Carlos's favorite spiral-bound is reserved entirely for the scientific study of his boyfriend. If this surprises you in any way, you have not been paying attention.)

It is then, as Carlos leans away on the two back legs of his chair, chews his illicit eraser and tries to figure out if asking Cecil to pose for a nude pencil portrait is too far, that he hears Cecil chanting outside the door. Carlos puts the issue aside for later and hurries to meet him. When Cecil steps in, draped in a hazard-orange rain poncho and brushing droplets out of his hair, Carlos feels suddenly as if something growing too large inside him has been made to deflate, and he has room to breathe again. The low light of their apartment no longer feels dark, but intimate. It hardly even bothers him that Cecil is speckled with rain water, though it hasn't rained in weeks.

“Good evening,” Cecil says, voice still radio-low, and leans forward to leave a quick peck on Carlos’s lips. When he pulls back, he’s grinning. “Let’s play with radiation!”

Carlos chuckles darkly. “Let’s.”

One of the every day mysteries of Night Vale, and Carlos’s personal white whale, is its truly apocalyptic levels of radiation. By all accounts, the x-ray machine he recently purchased at the Fuel ‘N’ Go should not be able to function with all the interference— but then the entire populous should have perished in a cancerous plague years ago, so what does he know? The whole contraption, including a table to lay on (actually the kitchen table), has occupied their living room for the past few days, to the point that the moss on the walls has started to curl around its base. After taking off his poncho and dropping his pants to reveal garishly purple boxers underneath, Cecil makes his way over. 

“It’s starting to look like part of the decor,” he says as he takes a seat on the kitchen table. “Think you’ll want to keep it after this?”

On his way to get the machine running, Carlos only shrugs. He’s already turned to start adjusting knobs when he feels Cecil’s hand warm on his shoulder, and is coaxed to look back.

Cecil’s eyes are sad. “Hey,” he murmurs.

A smile loosens Carlos’s mouth, and he falls a step forward to drop his face against Cecil’s neck. “Hey,” he says, muffled in the shirt collar. He sighs heavily. Two hands move up against him, one climbing the line of his back and the other finding a home on his waist, both warm and anchoring.

“You’re thinking about what we found last night,” Cecil murmurs.

Carlos tries not to tense up. “A scientist always ponders his findings.”

“A scientist,” Cecil breathes against his ear as his arms begin to wrap around, “needs to know the difference between pondering and worrying.”

“I’m supposed to worry.” Carlos’s fingers knot into the back of Cecil’s shirt, and he clings as Cecil hugs him tight. “We’re a pair, you and me. You know, some pairs, in nature, off in the wild, they bond so tightly that if one of them dies, the other never mates again, and just sort of wanders off alone and loses itself to the elements, and Cecil, I—”

“You’re afraid,” Cecil says softly.

“I’m afraid _for_ you.”

“That’s the worst kind of afraid.” They rest pressed against each other for a long moment, until finally Carlos feels strange and fidgety and pulls away. He isn’t like this, not usually. He’s felt fear before, fear in spades, but this, being tethered to terror by affection, it changes him. He should feel wonder right now, and curiosity, and a hunger for knowledge, but where all those things live, fear has encroached, big and bulky and with like nine legs, sending the good things fluttering off like frightened birds, and—

“Just try not to think about it, okay?” Cecil is looking him in the eyes, his gaze soft and formless. “Let’s do those x-rays. I know how you like bones.”

Carlos smiles with only half his mouth. “I do like bones.” Maybe Cecil’s right. He should just not think about it. He makes it his goal not to think about it. He really doesn’t think about it as he calibrates the machine. He certainly doesn’t think about it as he gets the monitors up and running. And he _sure_ doesn’t think about it when he gently positions Cecil’s body for the first images, and in doing so notices that, oh God, Cecil’s beautiful floral tattoo is arranged just so that a thin, jagged scar on his lower stomach is almost rendered invisible. No, he definitely doesn’t think about how Cecil doesn’t remember where the tattoo came from, and how a force that emptied out his body could have also easily emptied out his mind, how maybe Cecil’s lack of sexual knowledge isn’t an amusing coincidence but is actually a sign of malicious involvement.

He does not think about that. In fact, he doesn’t think about it so hard, that on his way back to rearrange Cecil for the second image, Cecil can _see_ him not thinking about it.

“Do you want to hear about my exes?” 

Carlos stops. “What?”

“Do you want to hear about my exes?” Cecil repeats, tone level and remarkably nonchalant.

If he were a wiser sort of man, Carlos would know immediately that Cecil is using his own curiosity to distract him. But wise and intelligent are not the same thing, and Carlos has always been very curious about Cecil’s past relationships. In fact, he feels oddly validated to know that Cecil has had them at all. So he says, “Yes! Um, yes. I would like to hear about those things.”

Cecil grins. “Well,” he says, as if into a vast audience and not his own living room, “my first foray into romance came in the form of a long-term courtship with the lovely Susan Sultan, President of Night Vale Community College and respected smooth river rock. Oh, did we ever have a time. Watching the sunset, picnics in the park. It was all incredibly sentimental, and I often questioned whether ours was a romance born of reality or between the lines of a banned novella. I thought it would go on forever, or at least as long as forever is a romantic concept and not a glimpse into the unsettling, unending void. Susan was the one to break it off in the end. She said the age gap was too wide. I was, of course, upset for a while.” Cecil sighs. “And I did, as City Ordinance requires, binge drink for a fortnight before setting fire to her home. But her point stands. I mean, a thirty-something quasi-humanoid mammal, and a multi-million-year-old slab of rock, forged on the back of history and ebbed by centuries of fine erosion into a nearly-perfect self? I mean, I’m not old-fashioned, but ugh— I don’t know _what_ I was thinking when I tried to make _that_ work.”

Carlos grins despite himself, and despite the fact that the monitor now reveals Cecil to have three extra vertebrae, one of which seems to actually be a large beetle. Carlos is unsure whether he’s more upset about the beetle, or about the fact that he’s never seen Cecil express the kind of flexibility that should come with two (or three?) extra back bones. Finally he chalks it up to radioactive shenanigans and goes to arrange Cecil again. His hand lingers unnecessarily on Cecil’s chest for a moment before he draws away.

“You said ‘exes’ plural. Was there another?”

“Oh, yes!” Cecil perks up, then remembers himself and returns to his previous pose. “Yes. After that was //////////// _///_ //// _/_.” The sound that Cecil emits when he refers to //////////// _///_ //// _/_ induces bleeding from the ears and eyes and causes the pictures on the monitors to waver. It manifests on so many frequencies that Cecil checks outside to make sure no dogs are in earshot before he invokes the name again. “We met online. //////////// _///_ //// _/_ was an other-being of sorts, I suppose you’d say.” He pauses to wipe the blood off his face. “We never actually made physical contact, but we exchanged _so_ many illegal IMs, and I received a number of love notes in collaged magazine letters. There were some phone calls too, just a lot of buzzing lowly into the my ear piece until I got too flustered, and, you know, a little blushy, and hung up. We only went on a few dates.”

Carlos’s brow raises, only slightly for Cecil's sake and mostly because of the x-ray in front of him, which reflects what looks to be the remnants of a second neck nestled next to the first one.

“Did you know,” Carlos asks without glancing up, “that a few hundred generations ago, your ancestors probably had two heads?” He looks to Cecil, expecting at least surprise, but finds only a face that says, _Oh, yeah, tell me something I didn’t learn in fourth grade science._ Carlos clears his throat. “Right. Um. Just a few dates?”

And like he’s been holding his breath, Cecil starts back in. “Yes, only a few. They consisted mostly of me waking up alone in strange places with a pounding headache and vomiting at least twice before hitchhiking back home, where I would find a single crimson dahlia on my pillow. I had a real charmer on my hands,” he sighs, wistful. “Nothing much else to say about that one. The breakup was bloody and involved, like, seventeen exorcisms. The usual drudgery.”

“Drudgery,” Carlos echoes faintly.

Cecil waves a hand in placation. “They warn you about dating outside your temporal plane, but at the time, you think, ‘What’s the harm?’ Then you spend the next six months scrubbing the melted fat and flesh out of your floor boards, and all you can hear are their I-told-you-sos crawling up into your ears and your eyes and your mouth, and suddenly your whole life is one big I-told-you-so but you don’t know who told it to you, only that they did and their laughter is vindictive and shaking the bowels of the earth.”

“Right,” says Carlos, and then positions Cecil’s head as best he can for dental shots without the proper equipment. He gets the images quickly, because Cecil looks like he might (literally?) combust if he has to keep his mouth shut a moment longer. He gives Carlos a slightly dirty look every time he returns to rotate his head just so.

“Cn I tell ya’ ‘out y last ex now?” Cecil asks though his teeth.

“Sure,” Carlos says absently.

“Okay. Well. He was— I mean. We met. One day, we just. Well. That is to say… He…” A pause. “You know what? That’s dumb. I did _not_ date anybody else. I don’t know why I would say that. What is a date, anyway? I’ve never even been on a date. Dates aren’t _real_.” Cecil stares blankly at the backs of his own hands, like they’re not even his and he’s just sort of found them there.

Back at the computer and mostly in his own world, Carlos finds to his confusion that, according to the x-rays, Cecil has over a hundred teeth. Of course, Carlos had been previously sure that Cecil had more than the ordinary thirty-two. Maybe thirty-eight. Forty at most. But he looks at the image, and then up at his boyfriend, and then back at the image, and can’t reconcile the two.

He scratches absently at his grey temple on the way back to Cecil’s side. “Maybe these x-rays weren’t in the best interest of this whole data collecting venture.”

“But you’ve been so excited about them,” Cecil says, and puts a hand to Carlos’s shoulder as he joins him to sit on the table.

Carlos shrugs slowly, like Cecil’s hand is a timid creature he might startle away. “They were for you. I wanted you to see, to see in solid scientific terms what you look like. And I guess I wanted to know. For—” he drops his chin against his chest, feeling his cheeks warm. “For personal reasons. But I really wanted you to know. You have a right to knowledge, Cecil.”

“Oh, Carlos.” The weight of Cecil’s affectionate tone causes him to look up. Cecil takes his face in one hand and turns him. “You’re so sweet.” He says it against Carlos’s mouth, and then they’re kissing, long and slow and easy. Carlos breaks away first, heavy-lidded and feeling like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t know what. Cecil is leaned down towards him, eyes just a little lower than Carlos’s, mouth open. They breathe each other’s air for a waning moment. 

“You forget I’ve lived here a lot longer than you,” Cecil breathes.

Drawn in, Carlos moves closer. Their noses touch. “Can you really call it living when you never search for the truth?” He kisses Cecil once, quickly. Cecil follows him back, but doesn’t return the kiss.

Their lips brush as he speaks. “Could I survive if I knew the answers?” 

Carlos hopes so, but he doesn’t know. 

Without preamble, Cecil pushes off the table and up between Carlos’s dangling legs. He kisses hard this time; his saliva tastes upset. Carlos leans back to accommodate Cecil’s sudden aggression, and returns the kiss with gentleness, because he doesn’t have to know anything about feelings to know that Cecil is frightened, too. He can feel it in the ever-slightest tremor of the hands clutching his knees, in the quick breath that breaks across his face, simple and animal. This sudden physicality is just Cecil avoiding the question, but Carlos is starting to wonder if maybe that’s the right idea.

With a theatrical little moan, Cecil pushes Carlos’s knees apart and grinds up against him. Carlos isn’t hard, and it’s exciting almost for that reason; he throws himself into it, pressing his hips forward and bringing his knees in. His hands go harsh against the sides of Cecil’s chest, thumbs anchored into his weathered community radio t-shirt. They kiss in a disgusting sort of way that’s hot just because they can’t see themselves, lots of suction and Cecil’s tongue trying its best to get down Carlos’s throat. He reaches back and grips Carlos’s ass, dragging him in until they can feel each other acutely. Cecil’s mouth breaks away as his head falls back to moan. Though he knows that it’s fake because Cecil is a performer if anything, Carlos still loves it.

“Oh— Cecil!” And wow, that is definitely Cecil’s hand sliding into his underwear, and that is definitely Cecil’s finger, getting really personal really quickly. “You’re just— just going right for it, aren’t you?”

Cecil shrugs one-shouldered, and looks oddly unsure for someone who’s currently on his way to getting his fingers inside his boyfriend. “I thought it would be kind of hot,” he says, sounding slightly put-out.

“Well, it is, I just— lubricant, maybe? Or? Other wet stuff? I don’t, uh—”

“You’re right, that was a bad idea.” Both of his hands are in the light now, and he uses them to guide Carlos back onto the table until he lays flat. He pushes his boxers down and steps out of them, and though Carlos is incredibly familiar with it, he’s still a little jarred by Cecil’s featureless pelvic region. Cecil, however, is quite comfortable with his body— Carlos imagines he always has been— and hardly wastes a moment before climbing up onto the table. He gets up on his knees and pulls his shirt over his head, and Carlos says without thinking,

“I love the way your thoracic muscles visibly taper toward your pelvis, but your frame is consistent and doesn’t narrow.”

Cecil stops with one arm still halfway in his shirt, and his cheeks are incredibly dark blue. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Carlos says, and clears his throat. “And your lack of natural bodily hair is a little weird, but it. It works?”

Finally free of the shirt, Cecil tosses the article to the side and looks down at himself. When he looks back up, he’s grinning. “You think I’m _weird_?”

Carlos shrugs as best he can, propped up on his elbows. “I mean, you know—”

“Oh, Carlos,” Cecil breathes, and crouches down over him. “No one’s ever called me _weird_ before.” Cecil kisses Carlos deeply, and they grasp respectively at each other’s hair and shoulders, each pulling the other in until Carlos is straining upward and Cecil’s knee slips to the side. He falls, and they both yelp. Gasping, they chuckle between kisses as Cecil lays on top.

All Carlos can really think is that he can’t believe no one’s ever called Cecil weird.

After a long moment, Cecil rises back to his knees on either side of Carlos’s hips. A smirk, and he begins to touch himself. He does it lazily for a moment, obviously more for Carlos than himself, before finally slipping the tips of his fingers in and allowing his eyes to flutter shut. His legs spread wider and he bends at the middle. Carlos pushes back up onto his elbows to watch as Cecil’s entire hand vanishes smoothly inside, drawing small, genuine noises from him. His arm twists at a funny angle and his lips spread delicately, leaving no doubt as to what his hand does inside. Officially hard now, Carlos begins to palm at his tented pants.

“How do I look now?” Cecil asks, and his voice is smooth and breathy and low and wow, how did Carlos land this guy again?

“You look like someone I’m really glad is my boyfriend,” Carlos says, and though Cecil lowers a suspicious brow, Carlos thinks that’s the most eloquent he can really get at the moment.

Cecil’s wrist now gleams with lubricant and his breaths come heavy. Finally the head of his cock emerges, followed presently by the rest of its curving body, dark and glistening. Before Carlos can act on this development, Cecil reaches to unbutton and pull off his pants in two swift moves. That, Carlos can jive with. He pushes his briefs down and kicks them away, then spreads his legs, more than ready for—

“No, I have a better idea.” Cecil grasps Carlos's cock, steadies himself, and drops down.

Carlos says a _really bad_ word. Quickly— too quickly to be fair— Cecil's inner chamber tightens up, and golly, Carlos has got to do some elasticity tests on that shit.

“Cecil,” he gasps, and then Cecil squeezes around him, and— “ _Cecil Palmer_.” Cecil grins, honestly pleased with himself, and begins a slow, undulating grind. Enraptured, Carlos lays and takes it. His eyes trace Cecil's pectoral girdle, and he quotes something from his notes, something affectionate and not really scientific, about how there is strength to Cecil's frame but also comfort. Cecil ducks his head, bashful. He tucks inward to leave a kiss on Carlos's forehead, and in doing this changes the angle pleasurably. Carlos pushes his hands up around Cecil's neck and laces his fingers comfortably in the nape of his hair so that they can look at each other, nothing between them but warmth and the nearly forgotten hum of machinery. Drawing his hands down over Cecil's shoulders, Carlos begins to move, an intense development where they share sensation. Cecil plants his hands on either side of Carlos's head and arches his back, which presses his pelvis down. His eyes do that 360 thing, apparently in honor of the way he’s managed to press his clitoris interrupts against— no. Darn it, Carlos is gonna have to change that name.

“Are you _laughing?_ ” Cecil asks, incredulous.

“Did I— _ah_ — ha—! did I tell you that I named your genitals?” Carlos asks, trying to find ground between gasping and giggling. Cecil writhes against him, and his cock leaves a stripe of wetness across Carlos’s belly that would be totally hot if Cecil weren’t suddenly shaking with laughter.

“Like— like _George?_ Or Mary? Could be either, I guess—”

“Oh, my God, you’re going to kill me,” Carlos gasps between slips of laughter, caught between the hilarity of it all and the way that Cecil’s insides pulsate around him with every laugh. Cecil almost slips off, and Carlos bows upwards to thrust back in. A chuckle becomes that chilling keening sound Cecil makes, and apparently whatever Carlos just managed to do was really great, because there’s a death grip in his hair and his name stuttering broken out of the most skillful mouth he knows.

“I meant,” Carlos says and grinds his hips powerfully upward, “scientific names.”

Cecil scoffs low in his mouth. “I knew what you— _yeouch!_ ” Cecil jerks and clutches at the side of his head, which he has banged on the arm of the x-ray machine in an attempt to sit up taller. 

Carlos almost sits up, himself. “Did you just say _yeouch?_ ” Caught, Cecil’s eyes go wide and his cheeks get darker. Carlos’s stomach becomes a fluttering mess of affection and arousal and laughter. Before he can think better of it, he reaches up and pinches Cecil’s cheek, then lets it snap back to his oddly narrow face.

“Carlos, you beautiful _cretin_ —” Cecil growls (although he’s grinning), then presses both hands down onto Carlos’s shoulders. Carlos goes along mindlessly and does what he can: he arches his back _hard_. Cecil’s cock slaps his skin with each thrust. He’s writhing now, almost ridiculously, and Cecil is open-mouthed and gazing lovingly. With every upward thrust Carlos's back leaves the table, meeting the harsh drops of Cecil's hips. He can see the muscles working, lean but strong, oddly free of sweat, as Cecil moves tirelessly up and down, lit from behind by the low sultry light, and _yeouch_ , Cecil is hot. Carlos thinks he might be muttering that out loud, albeit with more scientific terms, when he finally gets his hand free and goes for Cecil’s cock. He gives it a few twisting strokes, hand slipping off the head every time, before Cecil gasps his name.

“Oh—” Cecil comes just like that, no ejaculate but a violent spasming inside. Carlos hardly lasts a second, on Cecil’s coattails over the ledge, and he loses himself in the endorphins and adrenaline until everything is fizzy and bright and warm and he can’t feel anything except for Cecil’s body around his and a squarish palm shoved hard against his shoulder. The pleasure pulses hard before finally it goes, and only the two of them are left, breathing heavily. Cecil pulls off but remains crouching. A breath passes. Then, suddenly, he begins to shake with small chuckles. They grow until he’s laughing, tired and gentle, before finally he drops down next to Carlos. He loses the last few laughs in his boyfriend’s shoulder, and Carlos can’t help but at least smile.

“What was all that?” Carlos asks.

“George and Mary,” Cecil chuckles. “Sometimes I tell a pretty good joke.”

Carlos shakes his head, and then kisses Cecil’s temple. “It was funny. I have to admit, I don’t always, um, find things funny. But that wasn’t actually what I meant. I was talking more about this, in general.” He gestures between the two of them with his free arm. “Surprise x-ray table sex.”

“Technically,” Cecil murmurs, “it’s the kitchen table.”

“Doesn’t change the question.”

A moment’s quiet. Cecil hums a low sound. “I just. I thought we were going to have a nice evening together, and it wasn’t going that way, so I took it into my own hands.” Cecil smiles. “And it was nice.”

Carlos blinks up at the ceiling. “Yeah. Nice.”

“Look, Carlos. Dear, sweet Carlos.” Turning so that his elbow lifts him, Cecil looks Carlos in the eye. “When I asked what I look like, I didn’t mean— this is kind. This is incredibly kind, and lovely, and you’re a really awesome boyfriend.” His voice gets a little excited at the end, in a boyish sort of way that Carlos can’t help but love. “But I didn’t want you to get so consumed with it.”

Carlos shifts. “I’m not consumed.”

“You’re always consumed,” Cecil says, and he smiles, but his eyes are a little sad. “So, for me, just forget it, okay? Or you can just tell me I’m cute. That also works.”

Carlos nods. “You’re cute,” he says. “And—” he turns over and reaches for a notebook he left on the body of the machine earlier. His favorite notebook, in fact. He hands it off to Cecil with a soft smile. “This is for you. I wrote it. Just everything about you that I like, or that I could remember. I hope- I hope it helps.”

Cecil takes the spiral-bound with reverent fingers. Then, a light in his lovely eyes, he opens it and reads aloud in his deepest, smoothest voice. “ _Cecil is both broad and long, well-muscled but not chiseled, and lean without being thin. He's substantial but not overly so: there is a pleasant bow to his limbs, but he succinctly fills the space he is allotted, neither gangly nor overbearing. He is, in my eyes, an ideal specimen._ Dear Carlos. You are _adorable_.” He presses a kiss to Carlos’s cheek, and yeah, Carlos is blushing really hard.

“Maybe you could read it when you’re by yourself,” he says.

“You could read it to me!”

“I could do something that is _not_ that,” Carlos says, and sits up. “Like pants. I could go for some pants.” He slides off the table and finds his underwear, which he pulls on, and then goes searching for his pants. He doesn’t remember Cecil throwing them or anything, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time they crawled away. Eventually he finds them in the kitchen and begins to put them on. When he stands again, there’s Cecil, back in his overbearingly purple boxers. He wraps himself around Carlos from behind, and for a long moment, says nothing. The sun has set, but starlight floods through the open window, swirling wisps or purple and grey and white and blue that light them from below. Carlos regrets that Night Vale is often so beautiful.

“Sometimes it’s easier to just forget that you’re afraid,” Cecil murmurs into his hair.

Carlos’s jaw tightens, and he grasps one of Cecil’s hands in both of his. “It’s always easier. But it’s not best. What if it’s best to look for answers, Cecil? What then?”

Quiet. Cecil’s breath moves warm across Carlos’s scalp. The light weaves about their ankles. “I don’t think I could do that without you, Carlos.”

Wetness wells in Carlos’s eyes. He kisses Cecil’s hand. 

“Oh, Cecil. You’ll never have to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> technically the "plot" of this chapter flies in the face of canon because we know that Cecil can be captured on film/knows what he looks like since he has a picture of himself sitting on his desk, but we can all ignore that, right?
> 
> Susan Sultan as Cecil's ex was shamelessly stolen from "Run, Run, As Fast As You—" cause it's brilliant and i laughed about it for roughly nine hours.
> 
> thanks for reading! as always, please leave a comment if you liked it. (:


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